The evidence of escalating instability in the global system suggests it is entering a period of rapid, dramatic change as incumbent industries and political institutions are losing control. While the prospect of intensifying instability is daunting, the weakening of the status quo is opening up a new possibility space to explore previously unthinkable alternatives.

The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which US power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling. Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence,” the US now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority.”